Files show spy reported woman's intimate words

Toronto Globe and Mail/January 25, 1980
by John Marshall

Freelance writer Paulette Cooper is a finely honed,
long-haired accumulation of nervous energy. She was dressed with
a New York flair that seemed out of context in the small windowless
room in the grey dignity of the U.S. District Court building in
Washington.

She sat beside me at a long table covered with cartons
packed with some of the 33,000 documents seized from Church of
Scientology files in 1977 by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

"If you see anything about Operation Freakout,
please let me know," she said. More than once. Intensely.

Her obsession could be excused.

She had been living with it since the publication
in 1971 of her book, The Scandal of Scientology, subtitled "A
chilling examination of the nature, beliefs and practices of the
'now religion.'"

And from hearings in which the documents helped implicate
U.S. cult leaders in criminal conspiracies, she had learned Operation
Freakout was the code name for one of the Scientologists' obsessions-her.

Around the table and squatting on the floor in the
cramped stuffy room that day were nine other journalists, all
from U.S. newspapers. A copying machine was rarely out of use.

Two young Scientologists from the cult publication
Freedom were also examining the documents, which told a bizarre
story of spying, theft and electronic bugging by the cult, and
of blackmail, poison-pen letters, scandal-mongering and other
kinds of harassment to silence critics.

A U.S. marshal posted in an anteroom kept looking
through the door, and he checked all papers any of us took from
the room.

Miss Cooper thought she was ready for anything she
would find.

There were many documents about her. She could even
joke about some. There was one giving the purpose of Operation
Freakout-"to get P.C. incarcerated in a mental institution
or jail, or at least to hit her so hard that she drops her attacks."

She'd had years to get ready for this day-and the
many more days she worked with the Scientologists' most secret
files.

They had been nightmare years of borrowing money
to defend herself against 14 lawsuits filed against her by the
litigious cult, and to file counter-suits.

She told of finding evidence that her telephone was
tapped. She received anonymous threats that she would be killed.
Neighbors received disgusting hate letters about her, such as
one saying: "Her tongue is noticeably swollen from an attack
of venereal disease."

There were times when she considered suicide.

She lost the love of a male friend of six years,
who said she had changed under the stress and was no longer fun
to be with. His employers had received smear letters about him.

Other friends of Miss Cooper also were harassed.
Some received phone calls saying they could be involved in legal
action because of her.

And then came the topper. In May, 1973, she was
indicted by a grand jury on two counts of making bomb threats
against the Church of Scientology and of committing perjury by
denying the accusations. There were threatening letters on her
stationery and with her fingerprints on them.

Even her own lawyer urged her to confess. She refused.
She passed a lie-detector test. She and a cousin told about
the visit of a woman soliciting donations for a union fund, during
which the woman never took off her gloves. A box of Miss Cooper's
stationery was in the room. The bomb threat was reported the
next day.

The charges were finally dropped; but she did not
feel her name was cleared, she said, until the fall of 1977.
That was when she learned from an FBI contact that evidence found
in the July, 1977, raids on the Scientology offices showed it
had all been a frameup.

I found one of the references to it in the files
released by the Washington court that convicted nine U.S. Scientologists
on charges related to theft of government documents and obstructing
justice.

In one file was a letter dated June, 1974, from Dick
Weigand to Henning Heldt, two of the leaders sentenced last month
to four years in prison. Included in a review of an operative's
past activities for the cult was the observation: "Conspired
to entrap Mrs. Lovely (code name for Miss Cooper) into being arrested
for a felony which she did not commit. She was arraigned for
the crime."

The Mrs. Lovely name came up again and again. This
time it was found by Miss Cooper as she sat beside me. "Oh,
this is it," I heard her sigh.

She had in front of her pages of detailed reports
from another cult operative. She had expected they might exist,
but she hadn't been sure. He had, for a short while, been very
close to her, and pretended to be in love with her.

She began to read them, but found that she could
not brave the attempt there. Grim-faced, she duplicated them.

"I need to read these with friends beside me,"
she said. She did that evening at dinner with myself and Nan
McLean, a close friend from Sutton, Ont., who's a former Scientologist.

In a log entry for a few days after her indictment
for the bomb threat, the agent wrote: "We have Mrs. Lovely
in a very perplexing position."

She read it aloud to us. But it was tough going.
Much of it she read in silence.

In the words of the man to whom she had confided
her most intimate memories, to whom she had given full trust,
she read a description to his church leaders of how she had told
him about her first youthful sexual awakening.

Another page referred to a time when, depressed about
her problems, she had spoken one dark night about suicide.

The secret agent told his superiors that on the outside
he was sympathetic but inside he was laughing: "Wouldn't
this be a great thing for Scientology?"

To see more documents/articles regarding this group/organization/subject click here.